PIRA: performance instrumentation refinement automation
Jan-Patrick Lehr, Alexander Hück, Christian H Bischof · 2018
In this paper we present PIRA – an infrastructure for automatic instrumentation refinement for performance analysis. It automates the generation of an initial performance overview measurement and gradually refines it, based on the recorded runtime information. This can help a performance analyst with the time consuming and largely manual, yet mechanical, task of selecting which functions to capture in subsequent measurements. PIRA implements an existing aggregation strategy that heuristically determines which functions to include for initial overview measurements. Moreover, it implements a newly developed heuristic to incorporate profile information and expand instrumentation in hot-spot regions only. The approach is evaluated on different benchmarks, including the SU 2 multi-physics solver package. PIRA is able to generate instrumentation configurations that contain the application’s hot-spot, but generate significantly less overhead when compared to the Score-P reference measurement.